My Process For Educational Games: An Example

Today I actually created and finished one of the first educational games available on my online store. I have great plans for many more, but I wanted to make other resources (educational material, puzzles, quizzes) first, so it took a while before I actually got to the games.

In doing so, I realized it might be interesting to write an article about it. One that explains how I approach it, which choices I make and why, using a very simple example. Consider this a very short “devlog” for the game’s development.

The Initial Idea(s)

Let’s start with the first step: where do ideas come from? Well, they’re all around us. Almost everything you see from day to day, almost everything you could possibly “learn”, is easily turned into a game if you view it the right way. I’ve read newspaper articles and immediately imagined a way to model this complicated real life event to make it an educational game. I’ve literally made small games around the textbook when I was in high school to help myself be motivated and actually learn a topic.

In this case, however, the inspiration came from another game. As I play, design, and research a lot of games—both board games and video games—it’s obviously not surprising that this happens quite often.

The game in question is Tacta. A simple game about overlapping shapes on cards so that your color shows up the most by the end.

It’s a good game. It’s also clearly connected to shapes: recognizing them, matching them, rotating them. Despite not branding itself as such in any way, it was already clearly a very educational game!

I wanted to recommend the game on my store. I have a dedicated system for adding “external links” to my products, because I want to spread the love and tell people where they can find even better board games if they want. I still added this link and recommended someone else’s game, but …

… I saw a few improvements to make.

Finding Your Improvements

This is just the cycle of art, creativity and invention in general. You look at what’s been done before, find some improvements/flaws/changes you’d want to make, and so you attempt to make that version.

What annoyed me about Tacta?

• Setup could be faster. Everyone plays a color, which means you need to separate the deck into smaller decks per color and then let the player pick one. Though not the end of the world, this is annoying busy work, especially with a game this short and players likely to be very young and impatient.
• Limited application of shapes. The only shapes are triangles and squares. There is only a very limited number of ways to rotate/overlap them. I know why you’d do this, as it guarantees more playable cards on your turn and makes the game possible in the first place. But if I want this as an educational game for shapes, I want to introduce more shapes!
• The tiny variants at the end are really the best way. I’ve seen online strangers all agree with me here. The best way to play Tacta is not even the base game (where you split the colors neatly and only play for yourself), but a variant where you also get colors from your opponents. Because this creates an interesting game of “playing this card will give THEM points, but how can I place this card in the WORST way for them?” So … let’s just make that the base game.
• Everything can be shorter, simpler and cheaper. Or, as I like to call it, “minimalist”. Tacta’s cards are black; mine will just be white to save ink. Their shapes are fully colored in; mine will just contain colored “stars” to indicate color + points gained. If we design a different shape layout, we can reduce the number of cards needed in the first place.

Hopefully you grasp the general idea here. Educational games should be so short, fast and simple that young kids can actually play them. And with some small tweaks, in my experience, you can enhance the topic you want to focus on and explore it more deeply.

Additionally, my games are print-and-play. As such, I always aspire to save ink and effort (cutting all the material and such) wherever I can.

Okay, I had pinpointed strong reasons for creating my own game heavily inspired by Tacta. How do we actually improve these flaws?

• My cards just contain a random collection of colors. Cards are not “red” or “blue”, they can have a mix of colors.
• This allows simply dealing the cards randomly during setup, and you automatically play using the more interesting variant of the idea.
• My card design includes more shapes like hexagons, circles, diamonds, etcetera.
• To keep the game playable, though, I allow more freeform placement: you’re allowed to partially match shapes. For example, a full circle on your card can overlap a semi-circle below. This provided the right balance between creativity and placement options, without creating a big mess and making it too easy.
• The original game has a bunch of extra rules about playing area size, what to do if you can’t place anything, requires double-sided cards, etcetera. I removed all of that and replaced it with one simple rule. It’s not necessarily a better rule … but it’s fewer rules, which allows the rulebook to be less than one page.
• I can add “expansions” at the end to bring back some rules and add more tactical depth for those who want it. (In my case, I always add a cooperative version in Level 1 games, in case young children haven’t learned to wait on their turn yet and/or emotionally struggle with the concept.)
• (The original game has great help for colorblind people by adding a unique icon to cards. But because my cards don’t have a single color, I couldn’t do that. I had to make the actual stars distinct somehow. I ended up changing their number of spikes to allow also recognizing your own stars by shape instead of color.)

Please note that I am only able to do this because some other genius designer invented Tacta. It’s always easier to find improvements once someone else has already done most of the work. Similar to how critics can easily pinpoint massive mistakes in movies that make you go “how did they miss that!?”, but it’s easy to make such mistakes when you have to create a 2-hour movie from scratch. It’s why I clearly mention Tacta for people to buy/check out and don’t want to take full credit.

At the same time, these changes make this a very very different game. You can see that I opt for brevity and simplicity even if this reduces some depth or strategy in the game. In a way, I’ve become quite experienced at making the “educator’s cut” or “young kids cut” of existing game ideas :p

I’ve become incredibly ruthless about this over time. You can see how I banish any rule that doesn’t really really need to be there, banish all text unless absolutely needed, opt to reduce material from 10 to 8 pages if that is in any way possible. I know the effort of having to print and cut out a game—I’ve done it hundreds of times for my own games.

I know the immense effort it takes to explain board games to people (adults and toddlers alike, really). So I keep them small and minimalist, the rules a single page. Because it’s more important to play the game at all, than to make the game so incredibly good you’d play it hundreds of times … if only you managed to get over the hurdle of reading the 10-page rulebook.

The Results

All this work ended up as the game Strateshape!

You can clearly see the resemblance from the material and the marketing image. But hopefully you can also see how it’s slightly simpler, more friendly to printing at home, and closer to all the other goals I outlined.

As always, give the game a try if you want. Or try any of the other games where we clearly reference our inspiration, and perhaps learn from the changes we made.

Until next time,

Tiamo